Following the controversy around (and expiration of) Google's $15 million contract with the US Department of Defense (https://mashable.com/2018/06/02/google-defense-department-project-maven-contract-not-renewed/?europe=true#ebCfKFgiPPqN), the US government has now signed an $885 million contract with Booz Allen – and i'm willing to bet that there will be far less public debate around the ethics of the applications of technology under this…

Yet another example of the value of simulated training, researchers at OpenAI trained a robotic hand using hundreds of years of  object manipulation inside a computer simulation. The resulting hand movements are significantly more dexterous than anything developed so far. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611724/artificial-intelligence-driven-robot-hand-spends-a-hundred-years-teaching-itself-to-rotate/ A reinforcement-learning algorithm allows Dactyl to learn physical tasks by practicing them in a virtual-reality…

In an interesting piece of research intended to highlight the biases embedded in AI systems and training data, a team at the University of Melbourne produced a system capable of making assessments of physical attributes and the emotional state of people in a photo. Hidden in the assessments are a range of biases – gender…

Two years after the unveiling of the original Tensor Processing Unit, Google's announced "Edge TPU" – tiny AI accelerator chips designed to be embedded in IoT devices. Models will be trained on large, server clusters like today, and then embedded in edge devices in factories or workshops – perhaps analysing samples for quality control, processing…

In a major breakthrough, researchers from Deep Mind have improved the accuracy of AI lip reading, with half the error rate of previous methods, and over 50% accuracy. If embedded in to smart devices, it could make lip reading accessible to anyone with a smartphone – both helping the many people who struggle in noisy…

One obvious use case for autonomous cars is to ferry people on the "last mile" between their starting point (e.g. home, office etc.) and public transport, and Google's Waymo has started a pilot programme in Phoenix to help evaluate the model. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoenix-to-connect-people-to-public-transit/ Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business…

One of the questions we often ask in interviews is for a candidate to talk about a piece of data they've seen recently which surprised or interested them – an interest in data journalism is (for my team) an indicator of a person interested in numbers, a prerequisite for a successful career in data and…

Perhaps further evidence that "fitting to a curve" can produce syntactically and mathematically correct prose (e.g. which rhymes, has the correct pace and tone), without truly understanding the meaning of the content that's being generated, the emotion is missing. I'm sure simulation will continue to improve, but without true understanding of the causal link between…

I've never considered before what's missed when faces are "blurred" to provide anonymity – of course, you lose facial expression and so emotions. A new technique allows faces to be anonymised without losing that expressive motion. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180801131551.htm Researchers have devised a way to replace the use of ‘blurring’ faces in news reports when anonymity is…

Tesla claims its custom AI chips are capable of processing 10x frames per second compared to their current off the shelf NVIDA chips – opening up a wide range of future development opportunities. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/elon-musk-says-tesla-ai-chip-project-is-finally-coming-to-fruition.html Elon Musk said Tesla has been working on a self-driving chip for three years.